Representing a query appropriately helps model the underlying information need and thus improves the retrieval performance. Previous query representations either generate related words and phrases to augment the original query but ignore how these words and phrases fit together in new queries, or apply a specific reformulation operation to the original query but ignore alternative operations. I...

We study structural properties for information aggregation in settings where selfinterested agents take actions sequentially and partially observe each other. Agents optimize their choice of action based on some local information (or ‘private signal’) as well as conclusions they draw from observing actions taken by others. The literature so far typically studies the case where all agents observ...

Documents are often structured, for example into chapters, each with sections, and so on. The representation of structured documents should provide for a focussed retrieval of those components, individual or aggregated, of the documents that are most relevant to an information need. In previous work, we developed a model for the representation and the retrieval of structured documents. This mod...

Despite advances in treatments for cardiovascular risk factors, such as hypertension, poorly controlled blood pressure (BP) continues to be a significant public health problem in the United States. Medication nonadherence is a pervasive problem contributing to inadequate BP control. The patient–provider relationship offers an ideal opportunity to address patient nonadherence because providers’ ...

background: in countries like iran in that most of the population consists of young people, designing and implementing comprehensive health programs targeted at young people must become a priority in national programs. more than half of high school students in isfahan are female. because of their more vulnerability, and their role in health of future generations, it is essential for health comm...

Recently, social networks have attracted considerable attention. The huge volume of information contained in them, as well as their dynamic nature, makes the problem of searching social data challenging. In this position paper, to increase the effectiveness of social search queries, we propose exploiting the temporal information available in social networks. In particular, we introduce differen...

We discuss in a compact way how the implicit relations between spatiotemporal relatedness of information items, spatiotemporal relatedness of users, social relatedness of users and semantic relatedness of information items may be exploited for an information retrieval architecture that operates along the lines of human ways of searching. The decentralized and agent oriented architecture mirrors...

With the rapid development of wireless communication technologies, mobile social networks (MSNs) become more and more popular and have attracted much attention from researchers. In this paper, we address the routing issue in MSNs where a set of social related mobile devices communicate opportunistically and intermittently. Existing routing strategies are mostly based on location information (i....

Web is a platform for users to search for information to fulfill their information needs but it is also an ideal platform to express personal opinions and comments. A virtual community is formed when a number of members participate in this kind of communication. Nowadays, teenagers are spending extensive amount of time to communicate with strangers in these virtual communities. At the same time...